St James's, SW1A and SW1Y, for the hours after the curtain

Before the curtain, if there is time

A seven-thirty performance leaves a usable hour before it. One hour is £250, which buys a drink in a small hotel bar and a conversation that has not yet had to compete with an orchestra. Guests who do this once tend to do it again, because the interval and the walk home go better when the evening has already started properly. Say which theatre you are at and your companion will know the door you will come out of.

The interval problem

If she is coming with you, book the whole span rather than the halves. Three hours covers the curtain, the interval and a table afterwards, and it costs £700, less than three single hours precisely so that nobody spends the second act wondering about the clock. Tickets are yours to buy, as host, and if there is only one seat left in the house then an evening that begins at half past ten is the honest alternative.

After half past ten

This is the hour the quarter is built for. The hotel bars off Pall Mall stay civilised long after the theatre crowds have gone, and the walk from the Haymarket to any of them takes under ten minutes. If your plan involves a club on St James's Street, check its rule on guests yourself before the evening: a few welcome them, a few allow them only early in the evening, and one or two never do. Where anything is uncertain she takes a seat in a hotel bar instead, and you collect her from it.

Five hotels, for orientation only

SW1A 1NJ, at the closed end of St James’s Place. SW1A 1NY, round the corner in a courtyard. SW1Y 6JF, on Jermyn Street. SW1Y 4AN, in the old bank building on the Waterloo Place corner. W1J 9BR, two minutes west along Piccadilly.

Nothing links this house to any of them and nothing has ever been sought. Guests sleep there; that is the whole of it.

Stations, and the last of them

Green Park is 3 minutes from the middle of the quarter, with the Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria lines. Piccadilly Circus is 5 minutes east, Bakerloo and Piccadilly. St James's Park is 6 minutes south, Circle and District. The last trains go shortly after midnight, which is when this district is at its best and least crowded, so most evenings that run past them end in a car instead. Your companion travels by car in any case.

Who books in SW1Y

People with a seat booked and nobody to use the second one. Members of the clubs, and rather more often their guests, who find themselves at a loose end at eleven. Visitors staying in the small hotels who came for a week of performances and did not think through the hours between them. What they ask for is company that can hold a conversation about what was on stage without needing to have liked it.

The two who work this quarter

Karolina trained in dance, dresses in black, wears almost no jewellery and leaves a pause before anything that matters. She reads a performance properly and will disagree with you about it. Laura prefers an evening with a walk in it and music after dinner, and comes over from Paddington in about fifteen minutes at that hour.

From the other side of Piccadilly, Angelika, Luna and Samanta are eight minutes on foot, and Tina walks down from Covent Garden in twelve.

Next to St James's

North across Piccadilly is Mayfair, eight minutes from the Piccadilly corner. Mount Street is ten minutes into it, and the hotel row on Park Lane about fifteen, or five by car. Westminster, Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus are all within the same walk and are attended on the same terms. Green Park itself lies along the northern edge and is the pleasanter way to cross into W1.